is there truth in origin

One question last night posed to the author concerned his inspiration for a trope that emerges in three of his novels, whether he had personal experience that contributed to his use of the device or whether he simply saw great promise in employing it, to which he responded yes, he had experience with it and then detailed the experience with it, provided details and dates no names and places and events, all of which happened to him, at least. He was present for the events that occurred and saw them play in front of him. The participants were people. In the promise of these meetings he saw potential to explore more fully the disconnect (ah, there it is again, but reality is nothing if not persistent) between us and how these meeting sought to fill or lessen that gap. And so he wrote it down and wrote it down and made all of the participants fictional and all of the details fictional (inasmuch as a glass of water is fictional, or and overweight person scratching his stomach is fictional) and it became representative of a bigger idea, and then he repeated it and it became a trope.

This frustrates people, I’ve found: that fiction is just removing some details and adding others.

I have abandoned the Savage Detectives

I could not finish the book; reading it had become a lifestyle choice rather than an entertainment. It is the same with Celine or with Proust or Pound or any of the others…the endless circular study of a life bolstered by fiction’s great streamlining…interviews with real men who met real men and tell you the truth about these meetings that never happened with men who don’t exist, these things the men never said all true…you could spend years with this book, either in it or beside it. It is a fine book. It will exist when I am old, and I can return to it then.

what was it last week what happened

For so long the space between recording and memory has been short: if you do not record you do not remember. If someone sends you an email from four years prior and you cannot recall a single moment you yourself are describing, it sends this belief into the sky. To examine the importance of memory is a depressing exercise, as no one can retain everything. One is inclined to say that distraction plays a part in the inability to remember, in that one might forget the very thing one intended to recall when one is distracted, but who is not to say that the distraction itself was the thing to be remembered? What this means is that to keep in perfect isolation to avoid distraction would be a life that provides nothing worth remembering, but that the manifold bits of life worth keeping scream for attention and drown each other out.